Getting ’ instead of an apostrophe(') in PHP

I've tried converting the text to or from utf8, which didn't seem to help.

I'm getting:

"It’s Getting the Best of Me"

It should be:

"It’s Getting the Best of Me"

I'm getting this data from this url.

Solution 1:

To convert to HTML entities:

<?php
  echo mb_convert_encoding(
    file_get_contents('http://www.tvrage.com/quickinfo.php?show=Surviver&ep=20x02&exact=0'),
    "HTML-ENTITIES",
    "UTF-8"
  );
?>

See docs for mb_convert_encoding for more encoding options.

Solution 2:

Make sure your html header specifies utf8

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

That usually does the trick for me (obviously if the content IS utf8).

You don't need to convert to html entities if you set the content-type.

Solution 3:

Your content is fine; the problem is with the headers the server is sending:

Connection:Keep-Alive
Content-Length:502
Content-Type:text/html
Date:Thu, 18 Feb 2010 20:45:32 GMT
Keep-Alive:timeout=1, max=25
Server:Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.7 with Suhosin-Patch
X-Powered-By:PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.7

Content-Type should be set to Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8, because this page is not HTML and uses the utf-8 encoding. Chromium on Mac guesses ISO-8859-1 and displays the characters you're describing.

If you are not in control of the site, specify the encoding as UTF-8 to whatever function you use to retrieve the content. I'm not familiar enough with PHP to know how exactly.

Solution 4:

I know the question was answered but setting meta tag didn't help in my case and selected answer was not clear enough, so I wanted to provide simpler answer.

So to keep it simple, store string into a variable and process that like this

$TVrageGiberish = "It’s Getting the Best of Me";

$notGiberish = mb_convert_encoding($TVrageGiberish, "HTML-ENTITIES", 'UTF-8');

echo $notGiberish;

Which should return what you wanted It’s Getting the Best of Me

If you are parsing something, you can perform conversion while assigning values to a variable like this, where $TVrage is array with all the values, XML in this example from a feed that has tag "Title" which may contain special characters such as ‘ or ’.

$cleanedTitle = mb_convert_encoding($TVrage->title, "HTML-ENTITIES", 'UTF-8');